According to the latest annual "IBM 5 in 5" list of five technologies that Big Blue says will "change our lives within five years," cities will soon be capable of all kinds of interaction with citizens via analytics, cognitive computing, and cloud computing. (See the full list, including IBM's other 4 of 5 top innovations here.)

"Picture a city that knows not only when trains run, but also knows its citizens," states an IBM predictive infographic (see below). "Cities will become less bureaucratic and more open to sharing of data and social feedback."

IBM predicts that technology will enable cities to "help you live in them" in the foreseeable future. (Source: IBM Research)

C'mon. Is this image of a "learning city" one we can attribute to overly enthusiastic geeks, ones looking to sell technology to municipal buyers?

Not exactly. While IBM's image of a city as an independently intelligent entity seems a bit over the top, the tenet that technology can solve urban problems is borne out by ongoing, well documented projects. "Our five predictions are grounded in things we've done enough work on to be sure the technology really works," said Katharine Frase, chief technology officer, IBM Public Sector, in a phone interview this week.

In Dublin, Ireland, for instance, IBM has created a system to gather and analyze information from bus schedules, traffic cameras, GPS updates from sensors it's installed in vehicles, and other sources to get buses running on time. Similar traffic management systems are at work in other large cities in Europe and North America.

All of these projects illustrate that cognitive computer learning and analytics technology can be applied constructively to big data in big cities. It's an idea that isn't unique to IBM -- it's been taken up by Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and other big enterprise software and service suppliers -- but Big Blue arguably has articulated and marketed it best.

According to Katharine Frase, IBM's approach is to find the city leader who at once knows the city's issues intimately and also is open to using technology to solve them. Once cities are shown how technology can improve efficiencies in areas such as traffic, water, energy, emergency response, and city services, they're ready to try it, she says. The availability of cloud services makes it all more affordable and attractive, not just to very large municipalities, but to a growing roster of midsized cities, too.

Urban analytics is not just a matter of speeding up or automating certain tasks. Frase notes that the true value of applying cognitive reasoning and analytics to big data is that it offers solutions in context. Every city is different; what causes water waste or traffic snarls in one locale will differ from causes elsewhere.

"If a city wants, for example, to have elderly people take a bus to the doctor, we can use anonymized data to find out when buses are running, survey the people who don't ride the bus," Frase says. IBM studies the data in context and extracts from it the time and space attributes that will help solve the problem.

This kind of work is helping to create an enormous industry in urban big-data analytics. "Big data has myriad applications to boost the efficiency of government services while reducing their cost, achieving up to $95 billion in productivity gains. In addition, big data analytics can reduce expenses," states a report by McKinsey & Company released in July 2013. And Navigant Research estimates that urban analytics, or "smart cities technology," was a $6.1 billion industry in 2012 and will grow by a CAGR of 16.2 percent to over $20 billion by 2020.

Are there problems and obstacles? Of course. Security is one, though IBM maintains that cloud security is just as good as, if not better than, that of in-house systems. Privacy of data is another, though that, too, is as much a matter of communication and policy as it is about technology.

IBM's claims for city tech are somewhat idealized; but the results and trends can't be ignored. There are smart cities rising, and it pays to be among them, regardless of whose technology you choose.

Re: Analytics Well, in fairness, no big IT project is typically the work of just one vendor, and most vendors are fine with that. I've heard many offer at least two customers willing to testify to any solution they propose to a prospective user. The would-be client is free to contact those other users privately to get the full story.

Thanks for the link! It's still great to see the initiative for a new tech solution coming from within a municipal organization, no matter what brand of products are used to get it going.

And many times, it's the company that spearheads a project (IBM, Siemens, Oracle, Microsoft) that do promote the implement solution. Here's an interesting article about an e-Learning initiative in New Delhi.

We can safely assume that the amount of effort to build the e-learning platform was substantial, since it would be available to everyone.

Re: Analytics Agree totally, @mejiac, that successful implementations and pilots that other cities can point to will be essential to getting analytics underway. In the private sector, most IT projects don't get anywhere unless there are testimonials to support the undertaking -- ones that aren't biased by vendors, either.

I can already imagine a scenario where you have an emergency, and because of the analytics and having traffic systems online (along with emergency responders) you'd be able to coordinate efforts the same way a traffic controllers is able to drive airline traffice and have a clear view of the entire picture.

Re: NY Times agrees... Your comment brought something up for me, @hfreeman17: analytics don't always have to involve enormous projects. Some of the urban hackathons have produced incredibly useful and interesting smaller publicly accessible and free apps from city data.

This isn't to downplay the role of more sophisticated, IT-driven analytics projects. But it is possible to apply similar principles on a smaller scale.

Re: Analytics Indeed, once cities see how analytics can be applied to their problems, they're usually on board. I think awareness is probably key here; naturally, IBM's expertise and determination helps keep the bandwagon rolling, and other suppliers have been jumping onboard as fast as they can.

The only holdup, as I see it, will be funding and skepticism from cities that really don't understand what's on offer.

I think also of tools like Livehoods and its aggregation of passively generated data like FourSquare check-ins, making it possible for urbanists to interpret those data. Cities are most certainly tech incubators and drivers of new kinds of analytics.

Analytics IBM has definitely been the leader here in terms of demonstrating how smart city tech can truly change the future for the better. We often talk about too much tech in cities, but applying analytics to elements like water and energy use, as well as to transportation, and emergency response, strikes me as not only a no-brainer, but absolutely essential.

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